December 30, 2004--While
earthquakes and tsunamis are natural disasters, the decision to spend billions
of dollars on wars of conquest while ignoring simple measures that can save
human lives is not.

At least 134 ,000 people
were killed by the tsunami that devastated coastlines from Indonesia to Somalia.
Almost a third of the dead are children. Thousands are still missing and
millions are homeless in 11 countries. Hundreds of thousands have lost everything,
and millions face a bleak future because of polluted drinking water, a lack
of sanitation and no health services, according to UN undersecretary Jan
Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination.

Egeland said, "We
cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen
and fishing villages and so on that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of
thousands of livelihoods have gone."

No money for
early warning system

Much of this death and
destruction could have been prevented with a simple and inexpensive system
of buoys. Officials in Thailand and Indonesia have said that an immediate
public warning could have saved lives, but that they could not know of the
danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis
in the Indian Ocean.

Such a system is not
difficult or expensive to install. In fact, the detector buoys that monitor
tsunamis have been available for decades and the U.S. has had a monitoring
system in place for more than half a century. More than 50 seismometers
are scattered across the Northwest to detect and measure earthquakes that
might spawn tsunamis. In the middle of the Pacific are six buoys equipped
with sensors called "tsunameters" that measure small changes in
water pressure and programmed to automatically alert the country's two tsunami-warning
centers in Hawaii and Alaska.

Dr. Eddie Bernard, director
of the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, says just
a few buoys could do the job. Scientists wanted to place two more tsunami
meters in the Indian Ocean, including one near Indonesia, but the plan had
not been funded, said Bernard. The tsunameters each cost only $250,000.

A mere half million dollars
could have provided an early warning system that could have saved thousands
of lives. This should be compared to the $1,500,000,000 the U.S. spends
every day to fund the Pentagon war machine. This means that for what the U.S.
is spending for less than one second of bombing and destruction it could
construct a system that could have prevented thousands of needless deaths.
Lack of funding for an inexpensive, low-tech early warning system is simply
criminal negligence.

Indian Minister of State
for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal said, "If the country had such
an alert system in place, we could have warned the coastal areas of the imminent
danger and avoided the loss of life." But there is no room in the Bush
budget for such life-saving measures; the U.S. government's priorities are
corporate profit and endless war.

At a meeting of the UN
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in June, experts concluded that
the "Indian Ocean has a significant threat from both local and distant
tsunamis" and should have a warning network. But no action was agreed
upon. Geologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey said, "Sumatra
has an ample history of great earthquakes, which makes the lack of a tsunami
warning system in the Indian Ocean all the more tragic. Everyone knew Sumatra
was a loaded gun."

U.S. government
failed to warn region

Although the local governments
had no real warning, the U.S. government did, and it failed to pass along
the information. Within minutes of the massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake
off the coast of Indonesia, U.S. scientists working with National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suspected that a deadly wave was spreading
through the Indian Ocean. They did not call anyone in the governments in
the area. Jeff LaDouce, an official in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, said that they e-mailed Indonesian officials, but said that
he wasn’t aware what happened after they sent the e-mails.

In this day of instant
communications, controlled in a large part by the U.S., it is possible to
communicate within minutes to every part of the globe. It is beyond belief
that the officials at the NOAA could not find any method to directly and
immediately contact civilian authorities in the area. Their decision not
to do so may have cost thousands of lives.

Even a few minutes warning
would have given the inhabitants a chance to seek higher ground. The NOAA
had several hours notice before the first waves hit shore. Tim Walsh, geologic-hazards
program manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources,
said, "Fifty feet of elevation would be enough to escape the worst of
the waves. In most places, 25 feet would be sufficient. If you go uphill
or inland, the effect of the tsunami will be diminished." But the
inhabitants of the area weren't given the warning - as a result, television
and radio alerts were not issued in Thailand until nearly an hour after the
waves had hit and thousands were already dead.

The failure to make any
real effort to warn the people of the region, knowing that tens of thousands
of lives were at stake, is part of a pattern of imperial contempt and racism
that has become the cornerstone of U.S. policies worldwide.

The NOAA immediately
warned the U.S. Naval Station at Diego Garcia, which suffered very little
damage from the tsunami. It is telling that the NOAA was able to get the
warning to the US Navy base in the area, but wouldn't pick up the phone and
call the civil authorities in the region to warn them. They made sure that
a US military base was notified and did almost nothing to issue a warning
to the civilian inhabitants who were in the direct path of the wave--a warning
that might have saved thousands of lives. This is criminal negligence.

Disease may kill
tens of thousands more

The 134,000 deaths directly
resulting from the tsunami are just the beginning of the tragedy. Disease
could claim as many victims as have been killed in the weekend's earthquake-sparked
tsunami, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Medical experts
warn that malaria, cholera and dengue fever are expected to pose serious health
threats to survivors in the area, where waves spoiled drinking-water supplies,
polluted streets and homes with raw sewage, swept away medical clinics, ruined
food stocks and left acres of stagnant ponds where malaria-carrying mosquitoes
can breed.

"The biggest threat
to survivors is from the spread of infection through contamination of drinking
water and putrefying bodies left by the receding waters," said Jamie
McGoldrick, a senior U.N. health official.

"Within a few days,
we fear, there is going to be outbreaks of disease," Indonesian Vice
President Jusuf Kalla said. "Cholera is going to be a problem. This
is going to be the most important thing in a few days."

The response of the U.S.
government to this emergency is to offer a paltry $15 million "aid package."
To put this in perspective, this is one tenth of one percent of what Washington
has spent thus far on the war against the people of Iraq.

Money for human
needs, not for war

The U.S. and British
governments owe billions of dollars in reparations to the countries of this
region and to all other formerly colonized countries. The poverty and lack
of infrastructure that contribute to and exacerbate the scope of this disaster
are the direct result of colonial rule and neo-colonial policies. Although
economic and political policies cannot control the weather, they can determine
how a nation is impacted by natural disasters.

We must hold the U.S.
government accountable for their role in tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands
of deaths. We must demand that it stop spending $1.5 billion each day for
war and occupation and instead provide health care for the victims of this
tragedy, build an early warning system, and rebuild the homes and infrastructure
destroyed by the tsunami.